1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, a method and a program for assisting medical report creation, wherein a sentence may be created on the basis of those words and clauses which are selectable from multiple options. The present invention also relates to an apparatus, a method and a program for providing doctors with medical information, including information on the course of a selected pathological lesion or diagnostic names of diseases inferred as candidates.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many kinds of computer systems are being introduced into medical fields in order to handle medical documents such as charts and reports in the form of electronic data. These computer systems are intended to facilitate creation and management of the medical documents and thus ease the labor of doctors who are in charge of making medical reports.
JPA 2009-271620 suggests creating a medical report using an electronic dictionary and a template. The dictionary registers those terms expected to be used in medical reports. The doctor who reads radiographic images can write a sentence to report findings just by mechanically operating selection buttons to fill appropriate terms in the template.
JPA 2008-176596 discloses simplifying fill-in operation in electronic medical charts by setting several tabs for each sheet file that formats entry of contents into the charts, and adding a new tab or making a copy of a tab.
JPA 2002-203045 suggests providing a button for adding items about medical history and drug allergies of a patient to an electronic medical chart of the patient. Upon clicking on this button, selectable items pop up on a screen.
JPA 2009-080731 provides a text box for writing findings to each affected part or lesion found in a radiogram, each text box being given an ID. After an examination for follow-up observation, a copy of the previous medical report of the same patient is utilized for reporting findings on the same affected part identified by the same text box ID. Thus the findings on the same affected part of the same patient are associated with each other at different times. Making use of this association, numerical information or the like can be extracted from the reports made at different times, to detect chronological changes in symptoms of each individual affected part from the extracted information and to display them in a table.
JPA 2005-510326 discloses a method of creating a medical report based on a structured report creation paradigm. Upon clicking on an external feature such as a lesion in an image, coordinate values of the clicked point and the number of the clicked image will be stored in a database. Findings in a series of follow-up observations may be horizontally liked or associated with each other by drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste. With respect to the associated findings, disease course information acquired from the follow-up observations, such as change in size of the lesion, can be displayed as images and numerical data.
JPA 2009-082442 discloses a diagnostic assisting apparatus which is provided with a data base containing case data including fixed results of diagnoses, and a medical knowledge database for managing data for each type of disease, including the size of lesion, the stage of disease, the severity of illness etc. According to input search criteria including data acquired from medical examinations, data relating to inferred diseases or disease course information may be retrieved from these data bases and displayed on a monitor. In this prior art, a text entered as findings through a designated format or template for a medical report is analyzed using a thesaurus and the like to produce finding data. According to differences between the produced finding data and the retrieved data relating to inferred diseases, the retrieved data is narrowed down to choose data of a disease to be displayed as most relevant. In an example of search results, the size, location and shape of a lesion are displayed as data relating to an inferred disease.
JPA 2007-018460 discloses a diagnoses assisting system that extracts keywords from sentences written as findings in a medical report and memorizes the keywords in association with the diagnostic name of disease and the degree of conviction on the diagnosis. Thereby, the system can infer some diseases as candidates according to newly-input findings. In this prior art, phrases or terms are clipped out of hand-written findings through character recognition, and synonyms are converted into a unique phrase. Then, the converted phrases are compared with keywords which are each associated with a disease, thereby to name one or more diseases as candidates inferred from the written findings.
JPA 2008-027099 discloses a diagnostic assisting system that memorizes a main complaint or symptoms in combination with the name of disease diagnosed for these symptoms each time a doctor writes the symptoms in a medical chart, and registers diagnostic frequency indicating how many times the doctor has provided the same diagnosis on these symptoms in the past. Based on the memorized data, some diseases may be extracted and suggested as candidates according to symptoms written in a medical chart. The diagnostic frequency data will be updated for each particular disease, and the candidates are chosen depending on the diagnostic frequencies. The symptoms may for example be entered through hand-writing or template-input. As for the hand-written entries, sentences reporting the symptoms are subdivided into individual words, and the words are evaluated.
One of the most labor-consuming works for the doctors who read radiographic images and create a medical report on findings is to write about multiple lesions. Multiple lesions can include ones having totally different features or partly different features, or ones approximately equal in feature but different in size or in site where the lesions are found. In that case, the doctors are required to write about findings on each of the multiple lesions. Writing or inputting the findings on each individual lesion from scratch will take a lot of work and time.
Although the above mentioned JPA 2009-271620 suggests using template operation tools for reducing load on the doctors in creating medical reports, this prior art mentions nothing about entry of findings on multiple lesions. Likewise, neither JPA 2008-176596 nor JPA 2002-203045 discloses anything about entry of findings on multiple lesions, although they suggest adding or copying the tabs or providing the addition button in order to improve the operability. Moreover, the latter two prior arts relate to an electronic chart not to an invention for assisting creation of medical reports.
In a follow-up observation, which may be executed for example for the purpose of judging therapeutic efficacy, a doctor generally checks changes over time in symptomatic state of a lesion when creating an examination report on this lesion. Therefore, providing time course of past examinations and illness trajectories as disclosed in the above mentioned JPA 2009-080731, JPA 2005-510326 and JPA 2009-082442 is useful for the doctor to create a medical report efficiently. In addition, it is possible to conduct a medical session with a patient while showing trajectories of a disease or lesion of the patient and other course information on other patients of the same or similar disease, in order to facilitate obtaining informed consent from the patient.
However, if the provided information on the course of the disease is not adequate or reliable, the doctor may not be able to diagnose the disease correctly. Also the informed consent cannot be appropriate if it is based on inadequate information.
According to the invention disclosed in JPA 2009-080731, the adequacy and reliability of illness course information depend on accuracy of extraction of numerical information from the observation report input in the text box. Also the invention disclosed in JPA 2009-082442 cannot secure the authenticity of data retrieved as relating to inferred diseases if any of various analyses of medical examination data, such as CAD or morphological analysis, is insufficient in performance, and hence search keys obtained from these analyses are inaccurate. Therefore, high-performance analyses are essential for this prior art.
Although JPA 2005-510326 recites displaying illness course information, it does not particularly describe how and where such information can be retrieved from.
Accordingly, any of the above mentioned prior arts cannot sufficiently satisfy the need for boosting authenticity of illness course information so as to lower incidence of medical malpractice such as misdiagnosis.
In the invention disclosed in JPA 2007-018460, phrases or terms are clipped out of sentences written as findings in a report, and synonyms of the clipped phrases or terms are converted into a unique phrase, to compare the clipped and converted phrases with keywords that are each associated with a disease, in order to infer one or more disease candidates. Since the phrases or terms are clipped out through character recognition, the adequacy and reliability of the diagnostic candidates depend on the accuracy of character recognition, which tends to be insecure.
The system disclosed in JPA 2008-027099 is not for assisting medical report creation, but it is intended to assist a doctor with diagnosis based on main complaint written in a medical chart. Although this system infers a disease from written symptomatic state and names it as a candidate, the symptomatic state can only be input by selecting from among prepared sentences expressing symptoms on a simple template. Because more than one sentence having a relatively complicated structure, including many modifying words expressing sizes or body parts, is needed to report the findings on medical reports, the simple template used in this prior art is inapplicable to medical reports.
Accordingly, any of the above mentioned prior arts, even in combination, cannot sufficiently satisfy the need for boosting authenticity of data of inferred disease candidates on making medical reports, and thus lowering probability of improper diagnoses.